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THURSDAY, JANUARY 4, 1883 
AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN 
Memoir of Augustus de Morgan. By his Wife, Sophia 
Elizabeth de Morgan. With Selections from his 
Letters. (London ; Longmans, 1882.) 
E MORGAN is certainly no commonplace man.” 
Whenever we read this sentence in Crabb 
Robinson’s Diary we wonder how so acute an observer 
could have penned it. No one who has read the shortest 
article by De Morgan, or who has been in his company 
for however short a time, but would say that he was the 
very opposite of commonplace. Indeed the Diarist him- 
self elsewhere records “De Morgan called. He is the 
only man whose calls, even when interruptions, are 
always acceptable. He has such luminous qualities, 
even in his small talk.” This last testimony all who 
knew De Morgan will accept as true. Though nearly 
twelve years have passed away since the death of this 
eminent mathematician and logician, no account, so far 
as we know, has been given of his life and writings, save 
the appreciative notice by the late Prof. W. Stanley 
Jevons—whose writings so amply testify to the influence 
De Morgan’s teaching exercised over him—in the present 
issue of the Excyclopedia Britannica (vol. vii. pp. 64-67, 
1877), and the interesting sketch by Mr. Ranyard in the 
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for 
February 9, 1872, vol. xxxii. (erroneously cited as vol. xxii. 
in Jevons’s article). It was, however, well known that a 
“life” was being drawn up by Mrs. De Morgan. This 
is the work now before us, in the preface to which the 
writer says, “my object has been to supply that part of 
my husband’s life, the material for which would not be 
within the reach of another biographer.” 
Augustus De Morgan was born in the year 1806 (Mrs, 
De Morgan is not more explicit, but we learn incidentally 
from a letter—p. 394—that the exact date was June 27) 
at Madura, in the Madras Presidency.! His father was 
Lieut.-Col. De Morgan, who had held staff, and other 
appointments at several stations in India. Other mem- 
bers of his father’s family also distinguished themselves 
in the service of the East India Company. His mother 
was the granddaughter of James Dodson, F.R.S., author 
of the Azntilogarithmic Canon and other mathematical 
works,’ a friend also and pupil of De Moivre; from her 
he appears to have inherited his musical talent (‘‘his 
delightful flute”) and his mathematical power. From his 
mother too we are told that De Morgan inherited his love 
of a city life.? 
When Augustus was seven months old* the family 
* De Morgan was proud of his birth in the sacred city of Madura, and at 
one time longed to visit his native country . . . his doing so when young 
was prevented by his defect of sight. From his birth both eyes were affected 
with the ‘‘sore eye ”’ of India, and the left was saved (pp. 22, s). 
? He was also mathematical master at Christ's Hospital, and in connection 
with this “blot on the escutcheon,” De Morgan writes that when quite a 
boy he asked one of his aunts “‘ who James Dodson was,” and ieceived for 
answer, “‘we never cry stinking fish.” He had to wait a few years to find 
out that his great-grandfather was the only one of his ancestors whose name 
would be held deserving of record. 
3 In the ‘‘ Budget of Paradoxes” (p. 82) De Morgan applies to himself 
the lines :— 
** Ne’er out of town; "tis such a horrid life ; 
But duly sends his family and wife.” 
The memoir gives frequent illystrations of his dislike for even a short stay in 
the country (pp. 79, 94, 234). 
4 In the Monthiy Notices “three months old’’ would appear to be 
incorrect. 
VOL. xxvul.—No. 688 
came to England, and first settled at Worcester, but sub- 
sequently took up their residence at Barnstaple, and other 
towns in the West of England. After two or three 
journeys backwards and forwards, the father left Madras 
in 1816, having been ordered home ill with liver com- 
plaint, and died off St. Helena, leaving his widow with 
four surviving children. De Morgan gives in a half 
serious, half humorous way the idea ‘‘the victim” 
retained of his early schooling. At four years he learnt 
“reading and numeration”’ from his father. He always 
spoke gratefully of his father, but doubtless what he has 
written in his paper “On Teaching Arithmetic,” had its 
rise in this early experience, “it is a very common notion 
that this subject is easy; that is, a child is called stupid 
who does not receive his first notions of number with 
facility . . . the subsequent discoveries of the little arith- 
metician, such as that six and four make thirteen, eight, 
seven, anything but ten, far from giving visions of the 
Lucasian or Savilian chairs, are considered tiresome, and 
are frequently rewarded by charges of stupidity or inatten- 
tion. . . . Irritated or wearied by this failure, little mani- 
festations of temper often take the place of the gentle tone 
with which the lesson commenced, by which the child, 
whose perception of such a change is very acute, is 
thoroughly cowed and discouraged, and left to believe 
that the fault was his own, when it really was that of his 
instructor.” 
When about nine years of age the Rey. J. L. Fenner 
was for a short time his teacher; from him the boy 
“learnt his first—fortunately not his last—notions of 
Latin and Greek, with some writing, summing, how to 
mend a pen, and the first four verses of Gray’s ‘ Elegy,’ 
with a wonderful emphasis upon the ‘moping owl. He 
thinks, too, that ‘he pitied the sorrows of a poor old man’; 
but on this his memory is not so clear.”! At Taunton, 
under the Rev. H. Barker, he was taught Latin, Greek, 
Euclid, Algebra, and a little Hebrew. Of his last teacher, 
the Rev. J. Parsons, of Redland, near Bristol, De Morgan 
always spoke with respect. “It was strange that among 
so many teachers the germ of mathematical ability should 
have been so long unnoticed. It could not be quite 
latent or quite unformed in the brain of a boy of 
fourteen ; it can only be supposed that the routine of 
school teaching smothered and hid it from observation.” 
It was whilst at Taunton that a friend, seeing the boy 
very busy in making a neat diagram with ruler and com- 
passes, asked him what was to be done. He said he was 
drawing mathematics. ‘That’s not mathematics,” said 
his friend ; “come and I will show you what is.” The 
lines and angles were rubbed out, and the future mathe- 
matician, greatly surprised by finding that he had missed 
the aim of Euclid, was soon intent on the first demonstra- 
tion he ever knew the meaning of. De Morgan himself 
writes of this time, “On referring to my own experience 
I find that I have always had the image of ‘ /engih with- 
oul breadth.’ remember when I first opened Euclid, at 
thirteen years of age, I am sure I had no bias to admit 
any thing which should make mathematics ‘exist as a 
science’: for I should have been better pleased if it had 
not existed at all, science or no science. I thought I had 
studies enough ; and Walkingame, who I understood was 
* «*Recollections by Mr. De Morgan,” Appendix to Crabb Robinson’s 
Diary, vol. iii. p. 540. 
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